Is Christianity in crisis? What can be done to save it?

If you go to the second floor of the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., youâ€™ll find a small room containing an 18th-century Bible whose pages are full of holes. They are carefully razor-cut empty spaces, so this was not an act of vandalism. It was, rather, a project begun by Thomas Jefferson when he was 77 years old.

Painstakingly removing those passages he thought reflected the actual teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, Jefferson literally cut and pasted them into a slimmer, different New Testament, and left behind the remnants (all on display until July 15).

What did he edit out? He told us: â€śWe must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus.â€ť He removed what he felt were the â€śmisconceptionsâ€ť of Jesusâ€™ followers, â€śexpressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves.â€ť

And it wasnâ€™t hard for him. He described the difference between the real Jesus and the evangelistsâ€™ embellishments as â€śdiamondsâ€ť in a â€śdunghill,â€ť glittering as â€śthe most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.â€ť Yes, he was calling vast parts of the Bible religious manure.

When we think of Jefferson as the great architect of the separation of church and state, this, perhaps, was what he meant by â€śchurchâ€ť: the purest, simplest, apolitical Christianity, purged of the agendas of those who had sought to use Jesus to advance their own power decades and centuries after Jesusâ€™ death.

If Jeffersonâ€™s greatest political legacy was the Declaration of Independence, this pure, precious moral teaching was his religious legacy.

Full Story: Christianity in Crisis

Source: Daily Beast

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